I've been waiting for this for about 15 years, and it's finally here: a GPS unit that shares car data over the air to warn people of speed traps and other issues, and intelligently uses the data to re-route the driver. Outstanding. Can't wait to see how this works in real life.

I honestly don't understand all the details of how super-senior debt led to massive losses at leading investment banks, but the overall tone is clear: greed, stupidity, and hubris. Nice work. Let's hope these losses can be written down slowly and quietly, lest a more severe financial crisis erupt. It's of course too much to hope that the fools responsible for this disaster be held to account.

The CEO from my last start-up just set a new trans-Pacific sailing record in a two-man boat with fellow seaman Richard Clarke. The trip took just under eight days, smashing the old record, surviving swarms of panicked fish, and beating a field of competitors that included larger boats with bigger crews. Congrats, Philippe.

There's been a lot of talk recently about fairness--international affairs, the workplace, and so forth--so I found it interesting that the concept of fairness may not be cultural, but hard-wired into our human brains.

One of the misconceptions that clean energy advocates have is that wind and solar power can simply replace coal and nuclear as our sources of electrical power. The problem is that the current systems can be throttled up or down depending on how much energy is needed by consumers. This is much harder to do on a distributed basis. Worse, some of the best places to harness wind and solar energy are far away from population centers, and our current power transmission grid is woefully inadequate to this task and will require many billions of dollars to fix.

However, some recent innovations may help. An MIT research team is breaking ground on energy storage on a household level. Currently when you generate surplus electricity, it goes back onto the grid. In turn, the energy companies throttle down their production levels--because the grid cannot store energy for significant periods of time. Worse, the throttling process is complicated and expensive. If energy could be stored at the household level it would be more efficient, less expensive, and ultimately cleaner--and free the consumer from the power grid altogether.